Employers’ preferences for academic letter recommendations
This is fun. This paper on Employers’ preferences for academic letter recommendations shows that the opinion of Computer Information Systems professors is more valued than Humanities professors:
A survey was done with 72 corporations to find out the value of professor’s reference letters. The null hypothesis was corporations value reference letters from Computer Information Systems (CIS) professors, Business professors, and Humanities & Arts professors equally. Job skills (CIS) and people skills (Humanities & Arts) were considered equally important. Results from a Friedman Test reject the null hypothesis. A Sign Test on multiple comparisons indicated that employers valued professors’ reference letters in the following order: CIS, Business, then Humanities & Arts. Future research needs to be done to see if employers value CIS reference letters stressing people skills greater then letters stressing job skills and knowledge.
What does this mean exactly? I don’t know.
I dont know if it means that much, the survey was not about all the employers. Check this quote about the method they used:
“A cover letter describing the study and a questionnaire were mailed to 600 Information Systems (IS) Managers, Directors, and VP’s of companies randomly selected from NASDAQ.”
I think it’s normal that IT corporations seem to give more value to the voice of a CIS professor.
Comment by Nico — 11/5/2005 @ 8:36